When the hospital was almost complete, her money ran out. But then an article appeared in The New York Times in 1999 about Edna and her flickering dream, and a few readers in Connecticut and Minnesota reached out to help. One of them, Anne Gilhuly, a retired teacher, told me that she and her friends leaped at the thought that they could use spare cash to keep women alive.

The Americans founded a tax -deductible charity, the Friends of Edna Maternity Hospital ( www.EdnaHospital.org ), and a remarkable partnership was born that allowed the hospital to be completed and flourish. “If it weren’t for ‘Friends,’ we would never have built this hospital,” Edna said.

What they have wrought is stunning. On a continent where hospitals are often dilapidated and depressing, Edna’s is modern, sterile and hums with efficiency. She lives in an apartment above the hospital so that she is available 24/7, and she accepts no salary. She also donates her U.N. pension each month to help pay hospital expenses.

So far, the hospital says it has delivered about 10,000 babies, some of them after the woman was rushed to the hospital gate in a wheelbarrow. Edna has also used her hospital to train Somali midwives to serve in remote areas. Training a midwife at Edna’s hospital costs $215 a month for 18 months — and then that midwife will save mothers and babies for many years.

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If there’s ever a time when the needless deaths of women in childbirth — one every 90 seconds or so somewhere in the world, according to the United Nations — should be on our radar screen, it’s at Mother’s Day. And we know how to save those lives.

CARE says that $10 pays for food for three days at a hospital for an expectant mother. When food is provided, a woman is more likely to deliver at a hospital. Or with $190, CARE can buy a bicycle rickshaw ambulance to rush a woman in labor to a hospital.

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Save the Children runs a midwife training program in Afghanistan (where women are 200 times more likely to die in childbirth than from a bullet or bomb, the group says) and points out that $80 will pay for a midwifery kit for new graduates. And for $450, the Fistula Foundation can repair a woman suffering from an obstetric fistula , a devastating childbirth injury that leaves her leaking wastes.

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In a column a year ago, I suggested that we move the apostrophe so as to celebrate not so much Mother’s Day — honoring a single mother — but Mothers’ Day, to help save mothers’ lives around the world as well.

Eva Hausman, a retired social studies teacher in Connecticut, and five other women took up that challenge. They started a Mothers’ Day campaign, which has its own Web site at www.MothersDayMovement.org . They hope that Americans will consecrate the mother in their lives not only with presents but also by helping impoverished women and girls through a particular charity (this year it’s one that works in a Kenyan slum). They’ve found matching funds from a foundation to do that.

To me, that’s a perfect way to honor a mom.